Twenty years ago Human Rights Watch became the first international human rights organization to create a program addressing women's rights. In this interview, executive director Ken Roth discusses the challenges of working on women's human rights, and how the work of the Women's Rights Division has influenced Human Rights Watch as a whole.
First of all, the beginnings of the Women's Rights Division--can you tell me how it happened and why it happened when it did?
We started the women's rights division, and our broader thematic work, out of recognition that the human rights movement tended to neglect whole categories of victims. For better or worse, the movement tended to be oriented toward urban elites, often males.
Civil and political rights...
Even within a focus on civil and political rights, the movement was mainly responsive to a narrow cross-section of victims. In creating a series of thematic programs, beginning with the women's rights one, Human Rights Watch moved towards trying to compensate for this bias by hiring specialists whose job it was to address these neglected victims. And that was the rationale behind the women's rights division, but similarly Human Rights Watch's programs on children's rights, refugee rights, gay and lesbian rights, worker rights, disability rights, etc. At this point, the thematic programs are a critical half of the organization and provide an important complement to the regular country research of the regional programs.
Was it something discussed internally for a long time before it happened? What was the spur for it happening when it did?
Aryeh Neier started what we then called the women's rights project; he was director then. He was informed by his experience at the American Civil Liberties Union, which had a similar structure. That structure provided not only a focus on certain neglected victims but also the special expertise that is often required to do that work well. It also facilitates networking with different communities of actors.
It seems we were quite forward-thinking at the time--other human rights organizations weren't taking on women's rights. Dorothy Thomas talks about how brave and profound a move it was for HRW to do that when it did...
Well not only were others not doing it, but I vividly remember a conversation with the Ford Foundation in which they actively discouraged us from taking on women's rights, arguing that it would dilute the stigma of calling something a human rights violation, that the concept of a human rights violation was meant to apply to the more traditional areas of summary execution, torture, and political imprisonment, and not more. For us to address, for example, the state's systematic neglect of domestic violence was deemed an inappropriate expansion of the concept of a human rights violation which risked diminishing the stigma.
I'm interested in the original vision for the project when it was set up ...given that in its inception and early days Human Rights Wwatch was very much led by the struggle to protect civil and political rights in the post Cold War era - and many people, including yourself, have talked about how Aryeh Neier saw these positive rights as the only ‘real' rights. Yet many women's rights issues fall seem to fall under the economic, social and cultural rights banner...
It would a mistake to impute to Aryeh a desire to promote economic, social and cultural rights through the creation of the Women's Rights Division - that's not what he had in mind. The original mandate, he had in mind, was extending civil and political rights to a group of people who were otherwise neglected by the mainstream human rights movement. So he had in mind mainly fighting discrimination against women, gender discrimination. Some of the issues we've dealt with over time, such as maternal mortality, do involve economic and social rights, but that reflects a shift that followed Aryeh's departure.
Was that something you consciously moved towards once you took over?
Yes, very soon after that. My understanding of Aryeh's view is that he agrees that Human Rights Watch's methodology does lend itself to addressing certain economic and social rights issues. So I don't think he objects at all to the direction in which we've moved. But when I took over as director I recognized that because there's a positive law foundation to what we do-because our legitimacy comes from our application of international human rights law--we can't be seen to be picking and choosing which laws we apply. We thus need to have a serious economic and social rights program just as we have a civil and political rights program, or we risk being seen as selective and therefore undermining our legitimacy in the process.
Could we also talk a little about the public versus private sphere, and the evolution of private actor violence as a human rights violation...
The first time we did that was our report on domestic violence in Brazil. I spent a lot of time with Dorothy Thomas (the Women's Rights Division's founding director) ironing that out. If you look at it superficially you'd say oh, domestic violence, that's a private crime, it's not a human rights violation, because a human rights violation requires governmental conduct. So if you just have a private husband or boyfriend beating his wife or girlfriend, that doesn't look like a human rights violation. In fact, if you look at it in isolation, it's not; it's an ordinary crime. It becomes a human rights violation if you can show that the state is systematically ignoring a crime because of the gender of the victim. If there is discriminatory non-enforcement of the criminal law because the victims are women, then you have a human rights violation. And by demonstrating a pattern of this neglect we were able to transform what otherwise would have been just a series of isolated crimes into an official human rights violation. That conceptual transformation was very important. It began with our Brazil domestic violence report.
Various people have said it was ground-breaking, that it had global impact. Is that something you'd share - do you think we were critical in that redefinition of domestic violence as a human rights abuse?
As I recall, it was the first major report to do that, and we were very conscious of taking that step. We wanted to push the limits of human rights law. Just as, say, in the application of international humanitarian law we've always been aggressive in interpreting the law to maximize the protection of victims, so we wanted to do the same thing with human rights law, by pushing the definition of discrimination beyond the concept of state actions to the realm of discriminatory state omissions.
Has a lot of the Women's Rights Division's work been along those lines - state omission, failure to act?
Obviously we deal with a range of issues. Sometimes it's legal discrimination, such as some of the family law distinctions that discriminate against women in terms of their ability to inherit, or divorce, or have custody of their children. That's not state omission but state commission. Other times, say with maternal mortality, we've put an emphasis on state neglect, such as a failure to abide by a clear mandate to collect information and develop policies to address maternal mortality.
In the essay that I read that you wrote about economic, social and cultural rights, and how international human rights organizations can successfully tackle them, you were talking about how they could be most successful when you can find clear instances of violation, violator and remedy. In some of the areas like maternal mortality and reproductive health, they're such complex issues - do you think that's presented challenges for some of the Women's Rights Division's work? Trying to find those?
Defining violation, violator and remedy is essential for our methodology to work. Because, for example, if you find a problem of, say, inadequate healthcare to which a proliferation of actors contribute, it's difficult to stigmatize any one of them. They can all point the finger at someone else. In such cases, we don't succeed in putting pressure on any particular actor to change. So we need to find a violation, violator and remedy. But we've been able to find that. For example with maternal mortality, we deliberately are not just saying just ‘improve the problem of maternal mortality.' That would be a vague call to the world, which would be ineffective because everybody will all too willingly wait for somebody else to act. Rather, in the case of India, we showed that despite a mandate to collect information about maternal mortality, the Indian government wasn't even doing that. So we could assign responsibility to a particular actor. The failure to collect this information meant the government wasn't developing policies to address the problem, to improve maternal health, and so there was a violation, violator and remedy.
Did it take a while to formulate that, and decide what would be the best area to focus on, like that accountability area?
Whenever you do a project, it's never enough, in the economic and social rights realm, to say oh, there's inadequate schooling, or there's inadequate healthcare, please spend more money. Because the state pleads poverty, or it pleads other priorities. Meanwhile, the international community says it's doing all it can. So there's a diffusion of responsibility, and in such cases when there's not a primary actor to stigmatize, we can't generate the pressure we need to get something done. So for us, the key is to identify a government that is contributing significantly to a problem through actions that are either arbitrary or discriminatory--arbitrary in the sense there's no legitimate rationale for the government conduct (or inaction), or discriminatory because available resources are being kept without justification from a disfavored group, such as women. The need to find government conduct to be arbitrary or discriminatory isn't an artificial restraint on our work; it's a pre-requisite to achieving the stigma we need to get things done.
What about the cultural relativism argument, what impact has that had on the Women's Rights Division's work?
Most of the rights that the human rights movement addresses are codified in treaties that are broadly ratified. So, for example, the prohibitions of summary execution or torture or political imprisonment are firmly entrenched in international law and endorsed around the world. But there are three broad areas where the written law is not entirely accepted in certain parts of the world. Women's rights are one of those, the other two being sexual rights and religious freedom. In each of those areas, despite written law supporting our position, there is not necessarily universal buy-in. So in those circumstances, we have had to tread cautiously. To simply come in as an international organization, cite legal chapter and verse, and then urge adherence to that law, doesn't necessarily get us that far. Instead we've had to work much more through local voices. And we've tried to stress cases that will be seen sympathetically even by a population that otherwise might not be sympathetic to the concept of women's rights. So, for example, if you show tremendous hardship that comes from women who are excluded from inheritance rights, that often will generate sympathy that may get at least some in the country, the more open-minded, to re-examine their assumption that discrimination within inheritance law is the natural order of things.
Dorothy Thomas spoke at length about how hard she had to fight both inside and outside the organization to persuade people of the seriousness of women's rights abuses, that they were human rights violations. Was it something that you ever had to be persuaded of , and also did you have to engage in the same advocacy she did, inside and outside?
To be honest, I don't think that there was serious resistance internally to the idea that women's rights violations are human rights violations. Our women's rights division was created in the early 90s. In 1993, the World Conference on Human Rights was held in Vienna, where the slogan was women's rights are human rights. So by that point the idea had become mainstream. I really don't think there was serious resistance three years earlier to that concept within Human Rights Watch. It was a more novel concept in the world at large. And so I do think that there was a serious legitimization struggle that Dorothy and people in WRD did have to pursue in engaging with the world. But I don't think it was a major issue in-house.
She said people were worried about diluting their own work, and in some countries they were already doing such controversial work and to suddenly to start talking about women's rights would just completely alienate them.
Well that's a different issue. In other words, it wasn't a question of whether women's rights violations are human rights violations. Everyone within Human Rights Watch agreed they were. But there were issues of priorities, because often the country researchers already have a very full agenda. And Dorothy Thomas was always trying to get other people to do women's rights work in addition to the women's rights division. So that's one of the things she was constantly struggling with, so that women's rights would be seen as part of the mainstream of the organization as a whole, not just the work of our women's rights division. That's an ongoing struggle which reflects everybody being overworked.
Do you think that the Women's Rights Division and Human Rights Watch have had an impact over time in persuading other human rights organizations to take on women's rights, and conversely getting women's rights organizations to see themselves also as human rights organizations, and to work in partnership?
We have made an active effort to link women's rights and human rights groups. It is sometimes successful, but not always. When Human Rights Watch took on women's rights, it helped to legitimize women's rights as a natural part of the broader human rights agenda. That was an important thing to do. When you think back 20 years, it's hard to recall how contested the idea was that a mainstream human rights organization would take on women's rights. We've come a long way in those 20 years, fortunately.
Do you remember how Amnesty reacted at the time? They didn't take on women's rights until a bit later on...
Yes but Amnesty is structured differently. They didn't until much later establish the kind of research-oriented thematic programs that Human Rights Watch has. Their thematic programs tended to be more for campaigning.
What for you have been some of the major achievements of the Women's Rights Division over the last 20 years?
We've already talked about some of them, such as getting people to understand domestic violence or maternal mortality as human rights issues. In addition, there has been ground-breaking work around recognizing rape as a war crime, building protections for migrant domestic workers, and addressing discrimination in family and personal law.
Were we one of the first big human rights organizations to look at health issues as human rights violations?
Yes, in the sense, there are very few major international groups that do serious research on such matters.
We didn't take up abortion and reproductive freedom until relatively late, was there any reason for that?
There were two factors. One was that the doctrinal basis was not as clear cut as we might have hoped. You could make a strong case for why a variety of recognized rights should add up to a right to reproductive freedom, but you had to make the argument, it wasn't spelled out with the specificity that one would have wanted for so controversial an issue. Second, in light of that lack of clarity, there was a reluctance to take on an issue that clearly was going to be controversial. So we proceeded cautiously. We tried to establish our women's rights work in other areas first before taking on this more difficult issue. Already, it's an area where we have made a difference - for example, our contribution to some of the positive shifts in the availability of abortion that have taken place in Mexico.
Do you think there are any areas where there's still gaps in the work, or where would you like the work to expand to in the future?
We could make an enormous difference with more staff. There's so much more to be done. If you take family law in the Middle East, we're just scratching the surface. Similarly with reproductive freedom, we've obviously made advances in some Latin American countries, but there's still much more to be done. If you look at migrant domestic workers, we are making dramatic progress, but there is much more to accomplish. Rape in war is a big, ongoing problem. In all of these areas, we have achieved a certain conceptual recognition, we have made progress in terms of changing behavior, but these are still enormous problems that have not gone away.
What about sex trafficking, is that something we could do more on?
On sex trafficking, there are many groups involved, so we have tried to find areas where we would provide value-added. In part we have done that by showing that sex trafficking is part of the broader problem of trafficking, much of which involves workers who may have moved voluntarily at a certain point but have become subject to coercion later on.
How useful do you think CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women) has been? Do you think it has had major impact over time?
Again, every treaty, and CEDAW is no exception, provides a positive law basis for our work. So it's useful to be able to go to governments and say that we're just trying to hold them to principles to which they already formally subscribe. But even as a lawyer, I don't put enormous emphasis on the written law. What matters much more is people's moral sentiments about problems. And if people's sense of right and wrong hasn't caught up with the law, citing legal chapter and verse won't move governments. You've got to convince people that what's going on is wrong, not just that it violates a treaty. And so one of our challenges is to move people's sense of right and wrong in the direction of the law-- particularly in countries where they cite the cultural relativism defense. The law there is helpful, but we need to change public sentiment about what's right and wrong.
You talked at the advisory committee meeting a little while ago about how the creation of the women's rights division has shaped the whole organization. I wondered if you could elaborate on that a little.
What I meant was that our women's rights division was our first thematic program. It represented a commitment to answering to the plight of all victims of human rights violations, even those who traditionally were neglected by the human rights movement. And so the fact that virtually half the organization now is composed of thematic programs began with the women's rights program, and reflects a commitment to a broad human rights agenda, one that answers to everybody, not just some sub-class of victims.
You talked earlier about gender-mainstreaming, trying to incorporate a gender perspective into all of the work. Do you envisage a day when there'll be women's rights researchers in every geographic division, or should there always be a distinct women's rights division?
This is a perennial debate, and I have to say I come down in favor of maintaining a separate division. Which is not to say I don't want to encourage the regional divisions to take on women's rights issues themselves, but I've seen over time that it wouldn't be good enough just to assign the regional divisions the task of addressing various thematic concerns. The reason we set up the thematic programs--that is, the traditional neglect of certain victims--is always a problem. To address it, you always need the combination of the internal pressure group represented by the thematic program and the special expertise and contacts that they've developed, in order to have an overall program that really is responsive to the plight of all victims. So you need to keep the women's rights division. I don't think the aim is for it ultimately to melt away into the regional divisions-- that wouldn't be the most effective approach.
Would you like it to expand? I guess you'd like all the organization to expand.
Yes absolutely. That's an easy one. If you think about it we still basically have one women's rights researcher per continent, and that's ridiculous.
You mentioned about Ford being opposed to the women's rights division in its inception, and Aryeh mentioned that as well. But they did come to support the Women's Rights Division later, how did that come about?
I think it was mainly a shift in personnel. The two particular people, the chief human rights officer and her superior, had a very conservative sense of the human rights movement. Out of a conscientious belief that it was good for the cause, they felt the cause was best served by being narrow. We disagreed. By the way, I should say that our women's rights program is not the only place where they took this position. They also opposed our work on war-- the application of the Geneva Conventions and international humanitarian law. They thought we shouldn't do that either. And today that's a huge part of what we do. So it was just a different conception, one that was informed by the early days of Amnesty, when Amnesty didn't address such matters, and they thought that human rights organizations shouldn't go beyond that.
Was that just because Amnesty was the oldest human rights organization around, so it was seen as...
It was seen as the gold standard at the time, and kind of defined what a human rights organization should be. Human Rights Watch then was tiny by comparison.
And has funding been, I don't know if funding has ever been easy to get, but has it been a struggle to get money for the Women's Rights Division?
Funding is never easy. But I do think there's been a lot of interest in the women's rights division. Particularly at this moment when we're approaching the planned expiration of a major gift. There's broad recognition of the need to step up to the plate and to continue the funding so we don't face budgetary constraints.
A broader historical question - how much do you think women's rights have progressed in the last 20 years, in the time we've been going?
I think there's been enormous progress in recognizing the legitimacy of women's rights. So at a conceptual level there have been big strides forward. Which is not to say that there is conceptual agreement, there are still parts of the world where women's rights are contested even as rights. But we've made great conceptual progress. At the level of implementation, it's always a challenge. I think we can point to many victories, but there are an enormous number of challenges still ahead.
Do you think we are very gradually moving to a day when we will have equality, it's just slow progress?
I don't think women's rights are different from other human rights in this respect, in that there is almost a natural tendency for those in power to want to violate rights--because it's always convenient, for whatever reason, to suppress some segment of society. And the role of a human rights organization is to push against that natural tendency and to raise the cost of human rights violations. So I don't think the need for human rights organizations gradually withers away as some paradise emerges in the future. Rather I think there is this human tendency of the powerful to tend to exploit those who are weaker, and you need the human rights movement to push back. That's always going to be required.
In other words there's always going to be one group being suppressed, even one group eventually enjoys their rights there'll be another group taking its place.
Right, and you can say the same thing about free expression: do you need to defend free expression or will there at some point be universal recognition of the right to free expression? I think we will always have to fight back. There's always going to be somebody in power who finds it convenient to censor the opposition. There's always going to be somebody in power who thinks it would be useful to torture people, or execute people, or discriminate against people. And the role of human rights organizations is to raise the cost of that temptation to commit human rights abuse. So that when the powers-that-be are inclined to violate rights, they have to think twice because they recognize that there'll be a serious price to pay.
But with women it feels a bit different, because it's not just a particular group that's being violated, it's half the population.
Yes it is, and given the patriarchal nature of many societies, there will always be a temptation to subordinate women. Certainly within our lifetime the problem is not going to go away. And so there's going to be a constant need to push back. And that's the role that Human Rights Watch tries to play.
And we have really made some major changes.
Absolutely.
